How to Optimize Your Gear Setup in ESO
By Andrew | 20 Jul 2022 |One of the most important things that you can do in the Elder Scrolls Online to boost the effectiveness of your builds is to make use of front bar and back bar sets, allowing you to pack more powerful set effects into your build and optimize your gear setup as much as possible.
This article will explain what this means and how you can go about doing it.
Understanding ESO's Gear System
In The Elder Scrolls Online, your characters have the following gear slots available for weapons and armor:- 7 Armor slots
- 3 Jewelry slots
- 2 Front Bar Weapon slots
- 2 Back Bar Weapon Slots
Optimizing Your Gear Setup in ESO
In this example, we will consider a healing build for dungeons or trials. We will make use of the following sets for the build:- Spell Power Cure, one of the most common healer sets in the game, buffs your allies with Major Courage whenever you overheal them.
- Powerful Assault, a very powerful buff set that gives a huge damage boost to your allies when you cast a skill from the Assault skill line, such as Echoing Vigor.
- Sentinel of Rkugamz, a handy monster set that gives some resources to your group, making it easier for people to sustain.
- Grand Rejuvenation, a special Restoration Staff that also restores extra magicka and stamina to allies when you heal them with Grand Healing or one of its morphs.
Next up is Powerful Assault. This is a set that we really only need to activate once every ten seconds, it does not require constant activation in the same way that Spell Power Cure does. Therefore we can backbar this set, using our 3 jewelry slots and our backbar weapon, either a Restoration Staff or a Destruction Staff works for this purpose. Because all staves occupy two weapon slots, that means that we will have all five pieces of Powerful Assault active whenever we are on our back bar.
This only leaves our front weapon slots empty, and here we will put the Grand Rejuvenation restoration staff, which has a nice synergy with Spell Power Cure as we are spamming heals on our allies, obviously to heal them but also to activate both sets and give them some nice extra buffs, too.
This way, we place the skills that we need to cast frequently, such as our main heals and any buffs or debuffs that only last for a short span of time on our front bar for easy access. Then every few seconds we switch to our back bar and use something like [Resolving Vigour] to give our team the Powerful Assault buff. The good news is that the buff will persist even when we swap back to our front bar, even though we are then losing the final piece of the Powerful Assault set.
You can do this with many types of builds, including DPS builds, PvP builds and tank builds. A common PvP setup is to put a set like Hunding's Rage on armor, so that we never lose thedamage buffs that it gives, and then put Clever Alchemist on the back bar. This way we can simply swap to the back bar, drink a potion to activate the set, and then swap back and dish out lots of burst damage. Again, we will keep the buff from Clever Alchemist even though we swapped back to our front bar, because it already got applied to our character with a specific duration.
We hope you enjoyed this article about gear optimization in ESO. The Elder Scrolls Online is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) developed by Zenimax Online Studios.
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